Google Might Highlight When Search Results Are Scrubbed for ‘Right to Be Forgotten’

When Google starts implementing Europe’s new “right to be forgotten” in the coming weeks—by, say, removing an old link to a page about botched breast surgery—it may also highlight the fact that a search result has been removed.

Google is considering the inclusion of an alert at the bottom of search results so that users can see that the record has been scrubbed, according to people familiar with the matter, confirming multiple recent pressreports, including one Monday in the Guardian.

As part of its process, Google may also turn over some elements of the removal requests it grants to the anti-censorship clearinghouse Chilling Effects, as it does for copyright take-downs, one of those people said. That could make available online even more information about the removed material, depending on how much information Google redacts.

“I am sure that we’ll be publishing something on Chilling Effects but we don’t yet know what it will be,” said Adam Holland, project coordinator for the U.S.-based clearinghouse. What is posted on Chilling Effects would depend on “what Google chooses to do, and what information they decide they are able to share.”

The possibility of an alert to when information has been removed from search results underscores one of the biggest paradoxes of the nascent right to be forgotten, granted to Europeans in mid-May by the European Court of Justice: How can information truly be removed from circulation if the effects of that circulation – and removal – remain evident?

To be sure, Google still hasn’t decided whether or how to implement removal notifications, and how much information it believes it is allowed to include in them. When it removes links to websites trafficking in pirated content, the company offers a wealth of information, with a portion of its website dedicated to disclosing what it has removed, and who requested its removal. The site includes a list of domains involved in most requests – a kind of who’s who list of where to find pirated content.

But in this case, posting that much information about the take-down requests could run Google afoul of the court decision by making elements of the removed information available again on its own site or on Chilling Effects. Such a move could set off more litigation.

Then again, just making it more difficult – but not impossible – to find an old link may be enough to satisfy European privacy regulators. One regulator who supports the ruling said its aim is to make it difficult to find old personal information in a casual search, so that a piece of information isn’t plastered on someone’s forehead for the rest of his life, rather than removing it altogether.

“Old records should still exist in libraries,” the regulator said. “But, for some kinds of information, maybe not not on the first page of your Google results.”